I needed some red shading practice…and what way is better than building one of Char‘s Quattro’s suits?
On a side note, I actually started this kit about a month ago. But I’ve been really busy looking for a new house, so haven’t had much time to work on it!
So anyway, shading red is really fucking hard. It’s a very opaque colour and doesn’t cover well, so the usual “add white” technique doesn’t work very well, since the results are not very visible. Add too much red, and you get hot pink instead!
After some thought, I came up with these ways for shading red:
- Paint the piece as though it were white, meaning start from black base, and preshade it till it’s completely white. Leave a little more black around the edges than you’d usually do. Then, just spray red over the top. I think you’ll get the best results this way but it’s the most time consuming.
- Start with a dark red base, then shade either with hot pink or pure white. Then spray a light coat of red on top.
- Start with your final red colour, then post-shade the edges with a dark red or brown. Probably the easiest way, but you run the chance of overshading your parts.
Since I already started painting the red before I figured this out, I went for option 2.
Red parts after the base coat. I’m using Gunze Monza Red for this. Anyway, the next step was to add white to the mixture and spray start shading. I had to add alot of white before you could actually see the difference, but by then it ended up being hot pink. Definately not what I wanted.
The final step was to spray a light coat of Monza Red over the top. It’s just to change the tone of a hot pink to a very deep bright red.
You probably can’t see the difference in this pic, since the parts are very glossy AND it’s quite subtle as well. Hopefully it’s still visible after top coating.
Next update probably won’t be for a while.
i was thinking about shading red/blue parts also. i was wondering if i can do a base color of blue+black, very dark blue, than a normal blue, finally a blue + white as highlight. Was wondering if it could work, what do u think?
Yeah it would work. Keep in mind that if your base coat is too dark, it will give a darker overall look to the final coat. If you want a bright blue as the final product I don’t recommend starting too dark, as it takes ages and heaps of coats to get it to the right brightness. I built an MG Gato Gelgoog once, and used black as a base coat for blue. It took about 8 hours of shading in order to get the blue to a brightness I liked.
Blue is also much easier to do than red I find. With my Wing Zero, I just did blue, then blue + white, and it turned out pretty nice.